Under-6s ‘passed from school to school’ as exclusions soar – one headteacher is bucking the trend

26 comments

1. I might have missed it but I don’t think I saw it mentioned once by the author, the parent, or the school: exclusions aren’t just about the individual child. The school have a duty of care for all children. Keeping a troubled children at school can put other children at risk. The parent in this case said it herself, that her child was throwing chairs and tables.

2. Looking forward to hearing people opinions on this one.

   “More accountability for schools use exclusions”
   “Year 2 child was throwing chairs and up-ending tables”

   I mean, there are 29-31 other Year 2 children in a classroom and if a school cannot meet that child’s educational needs, they’re not going to magic up extra support from nowhere.

   It’s a tough spot; every child has the right to an education and to feel safe in the classroom.
   But deep down I can’t help but sympathise with the 30 other children and staff over that 1 child and their parent.

   And lol at “One Headteacher is bucking the trend”, like they’re doing the hard work here.
   Just saying no to the exclusion and forcing the teacher, TA and other children to carry on.

3. Labour have it all wrong. Support the 99% not the 1% dragged up by animals.

4. My wife has just quit a job in a primary school in an area that has a policy of non-exclusion – effectively what this article is asking for.

   The levels of violence, foul language and racism staff are exposed to is insane. My wife was earning the minimum wage and coming home with bruises down her side.

   People in other comments have said it’s the balance of weighing the 99% against the 1%. In my wife’s school one child was disruptive when other classes were in the corridor walking to assembly. He didn’t like other children getting attention or making noise so he would throw furniture and tear posters off of the classroom walls. The school moved assembly from first thing in the morning to the last thing on the day because he was calmer later in the day. People will have an opinion on whether it’s right for a school of 700 children to have their entire day reorganised to accommodate the behaviour of one child.

5. Bet this school has a lot of teachers leave over the summer.

6. Terrible, terrible decision by that headmistress. Basic discipline is the duty of the parents or appointed carer, not the school. She’s going to end up with a school full of wrong’uns with no recourse to punish them. This will only lead to low standards and the majority suffering from a poor education as it’s disruptive. You should always raise the bar, not lower it. I’ll give it a year before she either u-turns or is shuffled off somewhere else and replaced.

7. I’m a secondary school teacher, not primary, but of course we face the same dilemmas.

   It’s a really, really difficult one. Exclusions of course are hugely detrimental to the child excluded and I agree with others that all children have a right to education.

   But, as a teacher, I would also really emphasise that just *one child* can make a class unteachable and result in an entire class falling significantly behind. It can be a truly horrible experience for the other 29 kids. I suspect that many parents would be furious if they saw what actually goes on in many classrooms. And I also suspect many commenters here would quickly change their minds if they saw what ‘no exclusions’ means in practice.

   These kids need really, really targeted and specialised intervention that schools just don’t have the resources for. They shouldn’t be villainised; they’re children. And, when I think of the kids like this that I’ve taught, I have nothing but care for them in my heart. They just really, really need help that schools aren’t equipped to give.

8. Here is my take, and give me all of the downvotes:

   A child who is well behaved should not have to suffer to make things better for a child who is not well behaved.

9. Children need to be disciplined and the no-exclusion policy is crazy. If a child is throwing tables then they need to know it’s not tolerated. The parents need to do more, it’s all well and good saying they have special needs that need meeting but ultimately you can’t expect that child to get preferential treatment at the detriment of the 30 other kids in class.

10. If a child under 6 is causing enough trouble to be threatened with explosion, there is clearly something going on there and they should be fast tracked to CAHMs. For the safety and study of other children, I can understand expulsion, but mental health treatment and social services should be the first resort.

    I personally don’t think I’ve ever met an uncontrollable 6 year old in a school setting, but I will never forget during an entrance exam for a secondary school, even before we started the text, this 10 year old kid was trying to fight the staff and acting out, they had to remove him. If he was acting like that during an entrance exam with teachers and invigilators he’s never met before after only 5 minutes, I couldn’t even begin to think how disruptive he must have been in school.

11. I went to a school like that that took in trouble makers. They just messed up learning of everyone else and made life miserable for all the other students and staff.

    So I suspect policies around banning exclusions, probably result in more mental and physical harm to children overall.

12. Obviously I can only speak to my own experience. Hope below is somewhat coherent.

    It’s worth noting that children with behavioural problems are often referred to as having special needs in a formal clinical kind of terminology. This makes it sound like they have been diagnosed with , just as an example, autism or some such. But often it just means … they have behavioural problems. It’s just a label for being disruptive. A label that doesn’t necessary come with any specific identifiable problem apart from the behaviour itself. A label one significant purpose of which is simply to enable parents to externalise any responsibility and the school to claim they have done something to help.

    That isn’t to say that being badly behaved for whatever reason doesn’t mean you don’t need help. Nor to say that there aren’t many kids with more specific and identifiable education needs. But the problem is that by labelling practically everyone and by ever reducing expectation for their behaviour – one of the groups that actually suffers the most is *kids with special needs* because of the dilution of targeted help and the absolute chaotic environment they end up in.

    The last thing a kid with autism , or one struggling to read and write needs is another kid running around the classroom swearing at the teacher let a,one the whole rest of the class dong so. But I’d emphasise that the poor behaviour of many kids labelled special needs isn’t because they have autism, or can’t read or write it’s likely because they come from one of the many types of homes with parenting difficulties. And those kids and their parents may want school to reduce expectations of their behaviour but doing so actually reinforces the problem leaving them desperate for any kind of stable boundaries and pushing their behaviour further and further.

    Again I’m my experience over thirty years at the same time as more children with more serious educational needs being kept in the mainstream , provision for children with special educational needs has improved a great deal as has generally the standard of lessons and how tailored they are to , for one example, otherwise low achieving boys. The actual teaching including lesson planning – short sharp , fun activities *as much as is possible and actually still learn* etc is so much improved. It’s had to be.

    But at the same time , apart from outliers and possibly ‘wealthy’ catchment areas, expectations of behaviour and concentration and work have reduced. Expectations of pupils’ and parents’ behaviour. There are plenty of kids who have plenty of reasons for struggling at school that can be accommodated and succeed. But what undermines the whole system is a reluctance to ever acknowledge the impact of a family and peer group culture that aggressively resents any responsibility or expectations that aren’t simply appeasement. That has no respect for teachers or the worth of education and as in other areas perhaps always produces excuses that negate any sense of person responsibility.

    I think we have gone from a situation where more parents supported schools to more not supporting to more going out of their way to undermine schools. (And it’s the worst parents that tend to make the most waves.) This is encouraged by those whose memories of school in the past make them distrustful and resentful , by the media that unquestioningly spreads parents parents biased stories ‘they excluded my kid for nothing’, and even a government that will say one thing about the important of discipline while not supporting or sometimes punishing any school that attempts to instill it.

    The school can only do so much – it’s a problem that needs to be tackled within individual homes and more generally our cultural attitudes related to education.

13. “97% – of primary school-aged children who are excluded have special educational needs and disabilities”

    This is absolutely shocking, if a school isn’t equipped to deal with SEN they should admit it on admission. More schools need to be able to deal with SEN.

14. How are under 6s getting excluded even? Pathetic lack of discipline parents need to be fined for this bullshit. I wouldn’t have never dared to misbehave that badly at that age because I knew the fuckin fire of retribution that will fall on my ass when my mum finds out. Leather belt across my ass, I gut rude to an old man once at the hospital my mum just smiled at me then when we got home smacked the absolute shit out of my ass cheeks and say me down for an hour to explain why it’s unacceptable, the new day i profusely apologised to the man and I literally get compliments on how polite I am to this day. Maybe it’s because I’m from the baltics but my god some English people and parents are so soft and lenient on their children it’s sad literally raising a generation of shit heads

15. Ultimately, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

    If a child is preventing the rest of the class from learning or being violent and dangerous, then often they do need to be separated so that the rest of the class can continue learning.

    Yes, the disruptive kids do need an education too, but that cannot come at the expense of everyone else. The needs of the non-disruptive kids should take priority. Keeping the disruptive kids around the non-disruptive kids just harms everyone.

    Seriously disruptive kids should be kept separate and sent to schools specifically designed for dealing with behavioural issues or homeschooled, if only for the sake of all the other non-disruptive kids.

    Once the disruptive kids have had their behavioural issues sorted out, then they can be re-introduced to mainstream education. But not before.

    Schools with zero exclusion policies always end up turning into hellholes.

16. Kids don’t get feed properly at home and a lot of them don’t have heating in the winter, clean clothing a bed they don’t share with a brother or sister and damp houses to live in.

    That wasn’t my childhood but I could still act out at secondary school but I’d never get caught but I did go to a very rough school with a very poor class of people and 10% who were super rich.

    I could never understand how certain poor family’s had all the best clothing but they came off shop lifters and out of little woods or from drug dealer money.

    We also didn’t stab each other but I did get into many a fight but it’s a good job that I could fight as id of ended up dead or in youth offenders as that used up happen in the rough place I was born in, not saying as it’s dozing myself to name the place.

17. There’s a middle ground between exclusions and ensuring children have an education.

    But there has to be consequences for both the parent and the child, especially for more serious things like severe bullying, violence, property damage etc.

    My school actively rewarded bad behaviour. The “usual suspects” a group of around 20 bullies, badly behaved and all round not nice people, would get offered things like day trips, mcdonalds for lunch, trophies and other rewards for having a week without an incident, or coming to school every day for a week.

    What was people like me supposed to think? I went to both primary and high school every day and never had an incident. Wtf did I get for it?

18. It’s a tough one. Kids have a right to education and I believe that but sometimes I was in a class with that one kid with behavioural issues and the whole lesson would be derailed all the time. I’m not the smartest person and I needed help with my learning and quite often I ended up being confused and upset with my school work because the teacher was stuck trying to rein in one or two kids who just didn’t want to be there.

    I always wondered even back then what kind of chaos those kids home lives must have been though.

19. You need to isolate these children from the behaved children as the behaved are impacted in their schooling which is not acceptable. The goal should be to come up with a plan to reintegrate the problem child at some point but the plan needs to retrain the child. That training needs to be reward for good behavior and punishment for bad behaviour. Time to get back to basics and stop letting children with inefficcient parents running wild unchecked.

20. I was a disruptive kid. A right shitheel. I was passed from school to school until I was a teenager. I became suicidal, I was depressed, because the behaviour was not something I could control. I felt every time I acted up, the blame was always put on me. Not bullies, not teachers not explaining classroom rules, not a school system seemingly designed to torment students with ASD and ADHD.

    At no point was a behaviour management plan made. At no point were steps taken to remove behavioural triggers. I was bright, did my work, excelled in most things, I could have been allowed to read books or write in the library- rather than have to sit through hours of lessons in things I already knew.

    Not a household with a father who would beat me and scream at me if I said the wrong thing, dropped some crockery on the ground, or beat him in a game of badminton.

    I had to move to a school 1.5 hours each way from home, I’d take the train alone at 10 years old. My behaviour basically improved from exhaustion. My school work did not.

    When I became old enough and large enough that my dad learned that I could and would fight back, I improved. Once I moved to a school a mere 10 minutes bike ride away, I improved further. Magically.

    I got straight A’s, made friends, had relationships, went to an elite university for medical school.

    Has I been kicked out of education, I would be stuck in minimum wage job or in prison. Now I’m a qualified doctor and training to be a psychiatrist. I’m readying myself not to pass on my Father’s behaviours. I think this is a better outcome.

21. I’m not sure an absolute strict no exclusion policy is a good idea – there are bound to be some amount of kids that a non special-needs school is unable to deal with. But I do think that exclusion is overused, and could be cut down massively with proper funding off support for special needs kids and training for teachers. Not least because exclusion (if the kid can’t get into a special needs school) doesn’t solve the problem, it just passes the buck onto another school.

    And before someone comes and yells at me that it’s just shit parents, I have seen first hand, within my own family, that wonderful parents can’t magically make a kid with ADHD or autism behave perfectly in a school environment that doesn’t take measures to accommodate them, and that when the school does take steps to accommodate them that can make a massive difference to their behaviour and reduce disruption for other kids. And yes, that’s just an anecdote, but frankly I haven’t seen the “it’s all just shit parents” crowd provide any evidence whatsoever.

22. Is the answer completely to send kids to different schools ?

    I’ve known a few specialist schools in my life that had a focus either on Special Educational Needs , or dealing with kids who were violently disruptive .

    There are a number of things that need to be addressed in general;

    – overdevelopment in areas where infrastructure does not support it. Increases in class sizes it’s not enough funding for assistants or more so SEN assistants.

    – Delays in assessment for children for ASD, ADHD and other lifelong conditions, again which may impact the ability for the the school to be funded to support those children.

    – a better understanding of how certain conditions may impact the ability for a child to learn

    – deprivation related issues which may be generational or community based.

    – issues that require or do have social services involvement, children who may come from troubled households.

    – Issues relating to parenting. Young parents these days appear (many but not all)woefully unprepared for parenting , and children increasingly grow up in households where devices have more focus and attention.

    I’m a number of decades old now , I grew up in a deprived family , in a troubled area, went to multiple schools, and probably wouldn’t be where I am now without the input of multiple agencies and organisations through school, and home. A lot of those resources have disappeared or are no longer funded.

    In the context of pupils here, there perhaps needs to be further development for SEN schools that need it or new schools in general. I’m aware of a number of schools that are essentially two schools which operate very much old gender split schools used to.

    We need to improve things across the system, and enable better support across the board to ensure all school children are given the same and best opportunities

23. IDK about this specific child, but I have known (only slightly) a couple of mums with kids who are autistic with learning disabilities who have had to wait to be granted a place at the nearest autism wing.

    While waiting, they have to send their kids to the local school which can’t cope with their kid’s sensory needs and meltdowns.

    Yes, it’s awful to be in a classroom where chairs are thrown – I went to a shit hole secondary where brawls and chair throwing and assaults were all quite commonplace, and it destroyed my education.

    But at least some of these kids are not the results of bad parenting, some will be disabled children who aren’t being appropriately catered to.

24. It’s odd to read articles like this when the prevailing opinion among the parents and teachers that I speak to is that schools don’t exclude anywhere near *enough*.

25. Everyone ITT insisting that the school with the no-exclusion policy must be a hellhole. Meanwhile, [in the Oftsed report](https://reports.ofsted.gov.uk/provider/21/117174):

    > The overall outcome of the inspection on 13 December 2023 was: Good

    > Quality of education:
    > Good

    > Behaviour and attitudes:
    > Good

    > Personal development:
    > Outstanding

    > Leadership and management:
    > Good

    > Early years provision:
    > Good

    The article says that 97% of primary school-aged children who are excluded have special educational needs and disabilities. But according to r/UnitedKingdom, those 5-year-olds are just “wrong ‘uns” and their parents are “animals.”

26. Question; parents get fined if they take their kids out of school, or if they fail to send them to school at all.

    So what happens to these kids / parents when they’re excluded? Surely there’s an obligation to send the kid to school, but… they’ve been banned from school, so what happens? Catch-22; pay infinite fines?

    Genuine question from a father of two young kids about to start school…